No one in Franklin County was more “clean green renewable” than Turbine Tim.

Then the Noble Power Bomb dropped.

This past week Tim had another letter in the Telegram. Quarreling with the news that Noble hadn’t paid a contractor’s bill, whereupon the contractor slapped a beefy lien on two or three farms in Chateaugay. (Alas, this was only the beginning of the “rain of liens.”)

Tim gird his loins once more, took up his righteous clean green renewable pen, and began squirting ink. Ridiculous, he pronounced it. A “joke,” he called it. Attorney General Cuomo’s “wind ethics task force”? Joke. And the Telegram’s entire report? Another joke.

Don’t worry, he reassured, “these liens are obviously the result of a dispute between Noble Power and the contractor over work that was completed or not completed.” In other words, Noble had a beef with the work that was done (more likely, not done), and told these bozos to stuff it.

Joke joke joke. End of story. (He even posted the letter twice, just in case we didn’t hear him the first time.)

(We pause for a suspenseful moment. In fact, let’s go outside for a smoke. Let me say—mind if I bum a cigarette?—that for years I’ve been convinced irony is one of the immutable and basic ingredients of the universe, along with gravity and space-time. The Greeks seemed to think so, too. They called it hubris, and were certain the gods took a dim view of it.)

“Our vision is to be a leading supplier of clean, renewable energy from environmentally responsible facilities that will be a source of pride and benefits to the communities in which they are located.” That’s from Noble’s mission statement.

A source of pride and benefits to the communities in which they are located. Really? Looks to me more like this:

With appreciation to Stephen Gilpin

Life is hard.

It’s not just Tim and Ellen Chase. And it’s not just the 2 or 3 people named in the first Telegram article. As the Telegram pointed out yesterday, there are 45 of these unfortunates. Click here to see all 45 liens—and see if you’re included.

(Note to leaseholders in Franklin County: Forty-four of the 45 liens posted, above, arrived in the County Clerk’s office Tuesday 3/24/09 en masse. As a block. Figure this is merely the first wave. Contractors have, by law, till sometime this summer to file liens. You might want to check at the courthouse from time to time, to see how big is that ball and chain bolted to your house.)

(A note to Connie Jenkins, Editor of the Telegram, whom I suspect would pin Noble’s misfortunes on the bad economy, just as she blames cash-strapped Frank Cositore’s Flanagan problems on the bum economy. No, Connie, you’re wrong; these people are the bad economy. They are the reason the economy crashed and burned.)

It’s called gambling. Noble found eager gambling partners in big deregulated Wall Street banks, and between them they began “chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire” (Rolling Stone Magazine).

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans—all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization—that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely—turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

A bubble. Noble Environmental’s bubble burst. These liens—a multitude of them—are what’s left. I have no doubt Noble is hoping to reconstitute its bubble under the Obama administration. See “Wobbly wind sector sets sights on stimulus” (NY Times 3/30/09). The success of that gambit remains to be seen.

Tim, my friend, I think you’ll agree this is more than a dispute between Noble and a contractor or two. This is a company systematically stiffing contractors around the country. And you’re left holding the bag.

Ever wonder why Noble sliced and diced itself into an infinity of LLC’s? And what are the assets of each LLC, anyhow?

Chances are the assets of each LLC are close to zero, which of course was the whole point of forming them in the first place.

My guess is that Noble owns essentially nothing, having leased the white trucks, the trailers, the yellow Hummer, the office furniture—the whole shebang.

My guess is Noble doesn’t have the proverbial pot to pissin,and never did.

The contractors at this point don’t care a lot; what they have, Tim, is you. You have become Noble’s default bond. Your property = Noble’s security deposit when Noble skips out on the rent (as it were).

This is one of the 15 reasons why Noble didn’t offer to buy anyone’s land: Why on earth would it want to do that? Much better that you own the land, so you are responsible for Noble’s bills.

Get it?

The contractors know you have land and a house, and they know where that land and house are, and they now have a legal claim to both. That’s what the liens are about. And should you and your wife try to get a loan or, say, second mortgage to send your kid to college, or to buy or pay for whatever—you’re in trouble.

But you know this already. This is one of the reasons why AG Andrew Cuomo set up the statewide wind ethics task force. We are fortunate to have DA Derek Champagne sitting on that committee. I’m sure Derek is keenly aware of these liens.

Tim, I am not your adversary. Nor do I take pleasure in these liens. Yes, I suspected from the start that Noble was less than it claimed to be. Many of us pointed this out to your town board and the IDA’s (see Martin to Clinton County IDA 5/23/06). But I’m not going to flog you over this.

You have believed in renewable energy. I have, too. After all, I’m an intelligent man, as you are. The diabolical thing about renewable energy—any energy source, for that matter—is that it comes with baggage. Sometimes huge & scary baggage.

Wind energy, in my research, comes with more problems than it’s worth. Nuclear used to have huge problems. My understanding of nuclear is that many countries have solved the more egregious problems of nuclear, including recycling of spent uranium (witness France).

Back to Big Wind. I don’t think these turbines belong in people’s backyards. That’s been my position all along. And if your backyard abuts my backyard, and you put ’em in your backyard, then by definition they’re in mine, as well. I suspect you and I would disagree endlessly on this point, so we’ll just drop it.

Noble’s shameless behavior is an altogether different matter. Whether you’re a fan of Big Wind or not (I am not), it’s clear that systematically ripping off contractors around the country is despicable. I would be despicable, too, if I didn’t pay my bills. There is no reasonable or acceptable excuse for this. Period.

I am sorry for this. I am sorry that a dream and a hope and goodwill held by many people, including you and your wife, should be soiled by Noble’s behavior.

Like you, I hope Noble pays its bills someday. And I hope those liens are removed from your property. And I hope wind energy turns out to be all you wish it would be—and I’m not being sarcastic. I mean this. I am not your critic, Tim. Yes, I am Noble’s critic, but not yours. Like countless other people, you acted in good faith, only to see it scorned. This is not something to gloat over; this is something to break one’s heart.

Comments for this entry

Jeanne Norris

7-24-2009

This is a comment on alternative fuel possibilities for the North Country (& planet Earth) that do NOT include wind power.
The north country economy is tied to a dying dairy industry which can barely afford diesel fuel for tractors. Farmers can’t afford to remove manure so it piles up and leaks into streams, ponds, Lake Cahmplain making the water thick all summer with pond scum.
This is a situation which contains the seeds of its own cure. We ought to be able to make our own diesel fuel and heating oil using pond scum and cow manure. This is actually being tried to some success in Vermont and all we need is someone with the right kind of scientific background and some modest funding to get this project started.
Bio fuel is being experimented with locally. Take it one step further, from used cooking oil to oil created from algae grown on manure. Some preliminary experiments to establish that this actually works and what the optimal operating conditions would be should be the next step.
If anyone reading this can think of a way to implement this project I know the scientist who can conduct the basic research and set up. Is this something that could be done as a science project at NCCC?…or even the highschool?
Any feedback/input would be appreciated…even a resounding: Are you nuts?..What’s needed is a little $$ and a lot of time.

richard moody jr.

5-31-2009

One aspect of the nuclear option that might interest your readers. When I gave a couple of talks at the Natural Philosophy Alliance meeting in Storrs, Connecticut last week, I met a nuclear engineer/physicist who was the go to guy for Army Intelligence when it came to nuclear transients. When asked to give his assessment of Chernoble to the Army brass in terms of casualities shortly after Chernoble went south, he said, “You are going to lose a bunch of firefighters and the helicopter pilots who flew through the radioactive plume. This should be about 35-40 casualties. That’s it.” Recently, the World Health Organization indicated that about 40 people had died because of Chernoble.

Chernoble consisted of vertical concrete walls 2-3 feet thick with a tar paper roof (Note to Greenpeace—American reactors have reactor domes, not tar paper roofs. They don’t use graphite, which burns, either). When the fire struck, the concrete walls served as chimneys and the plume climbed vertically, traveled 30 miles and then descended in a sparsely populated area. Only the peasants drinking milk from cows eating radioactivity grass developed thyroid cancer from the radioactive iodine (Only the volatiles radioactive cesium and iodine left the reactor).

It is not a good idea to eat striped bass from the Hudson unless you like the taste of PCB’s. Don’t eat predatory fish from the Atlantic three times a day, unless you groove on mercury induced insanity and don’t drink milk from cows eating radioactive grass. Duh. While inhaled plutonium vapors can kill you at low levels, eat plutonium, except for plutonium citrate and it will be excreted without harm to the user.

The studies of low levels of radiation on health are basically bogus using the argument that low level mortality can be extrapolated from high dosages. Think about it: If I eat 1000 aspirin all at once and die, does this mean that if 1,000,000 people eat one aspirin/day for a year, that 1000 will die of aspirin poisoning? This is the model to determine the impact of low doses of radiation. It is great if you want to create a new industry to get radon out of your basement (Have you ever seen a tombstone reading, “Died from spending too much time in the basement?”), but it makes for low quality science.

Don’t walk outside unless you want to be hit with ionizing radiation from the sun or get zapped by a zircon. I got more radioactivity from black shales digging for fool’s gold than the overwhelming majority of Chernobleites got from the meltdown. Cells do tend to regenerate. Oh, by the way, comparing Chernoble to American plants is like comparing the safety features of a Model T (Chernoble) to a Lexus (American nuclear plants).

You can thank Senator John Kerry and the multigenerational incompetence of the Department Of Energy for our failed energy policy. Just plot up our dependence on foreign oil through time and the funding for MIT’s hot fusion program over the past 30 years and you will find a strong correlation. If we had spent the $15 billion on real solutions to this nation’s energy needs with today’s programs, starting 30 years ago, we would have energy independence today.

Kerry and Hazel O’Leary shut down the Integral Fast Reactor program in 1994 because it competed with MIT’s hot fusion program (when you combine atoms—fusion—instead of splitting them apart—fission.) MIT stood to lose billions of dollars in research grants if the IFR went ahead. Kerry shut it down to protect MIT’s hot fusion program. No other Senators expressed any interest in shutting down the program. Quite clearly, Senator Kerry was protecting his constituents.

This new generation of nuclear fission reactors (IFR’s) can’t meltdown (In a pretty brazen act, the researchers fixed the control rods of the reactor, shut down the coolant pumps and allowed the reactor to “cook” to see what would happen. It shut itself down and the low heat content of the plutonium allowed the liquid sodium bath to passively cool off the reactor without incident.), consumes its own waste, could clean up radioactive wastes so that there would be no need for Yucca Mountain, and could provide us a sink for all special nuclear material e.g. the plutonium from decommissioned warheads. It is, according to experts, proliferation resistant and weapons incompatible.

Big tobacco told you that nicotine was not addictive. Big coal told you that CO^2 doesn’t cause global warming. Big physics (MIT) told you that the IFR led to nuclear proliferation. They also didn’t tell you that their reactor releases tritium, a radioactive gas, into the air during routine operation and that their radioactive wastes are even more deadly than those from a fission plant. Also, the fuel, tritium, costs as much as burning one carat diamonds in their reactors!

Hot fusion at MIT and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a boondoggle, pork for physicists and the Vietnam and Iraq of our energy policy. I am going to circulate a petition to send to Congress to implement the NWPA. This stands for the National Welfare for Physicist Act. If we can pay farmers not to grow certain crops, perhaps we can pay MIT scientists not to study hot fusion and we can save the remaining monies to find real solutions to our energy needs!

There’s the concept of the innocent consumer clause. That is, the leaseholders signed something they shouldn’t have and were incredibly casual with their property or their granddaddy’s property.

The real culprits are the town board members that strutted around in business matters on a scale and type that they had no business engaging in. Industrial planning in a residentially zoned land? This isn’t Billy Joe Bob’s town business of deciding what color and model the next snowplow should be; this is huge and serious business with a level of complexity that requires strong expertise. There are entire city planning departments with industrial engineers and certified planners working day and night to bring a new industry into an area, and it’s not a few PowerPoint slides at the school gym and a lunch bus trip.

What is plain to see is these town boards were clearly way over their heads and gave these property owners an incredibly false sense of confidence and enabled very bad judgement. Where was the town’s attorney in structuring the language of the law to protect the residents? Where are the breach of contract conditions? I bet there are few if any.

These attorneys are a joke to the profession and completely breached their fiduciary responsibilities to the town and the residents.

The developers came in and rolled over these towns and property owners, and all we get now from the bold supervisors is, “We need to be careful or we will be sued and lose. There is little we can do.”

This is pure insanity.

formosa

Leo S.

3-29-2009

From my Sunday school days I learned, “Money is the root of all evil.” The dollar sign can cloud ones judgement. I am sad to say, unfortunately it will be repeated again and again.

lenny59

3-28-2009

Hooray, finally one or a few greedy farmers (landowners) are getting bowled over by a ball of their own waste.

I hope this happens to many more, then maybe someone will wake up to the hoax of wind energy, and begin to understand what those of us have to put up with, living near these terrribly inefficient, noisy industrial wind turbines.

One Wisconsin senator called the wind hoax “politically hot” right now, and is going to continue promoting it. I hope his constituents remember that at election time and vote him and others out of office.

Editor’s note: The author lives with turbines next to his home in Wisconsin. He writes from bitter personal experience.

Wayne Miller

3-28-2009

JP Morgan himself, the man behind the bank that eventually spawned Noble, said, “There are two reasons why a man does anything: a good one and the real one.” Mrs. Anderson thinks this applies to anyone signing a lease. Calvin suggests this mindset is limited to Noble. As Calvin points out, it doesn’t matter. And Calvin posits that the community will heal.

Yes, but how many generations will it take? I grew up hearing about how this one or that one took advantage of the situation when the banks failed and the country fell into the Great Depression. It was said with disdain decades later. People, especially in small towns, have a long memory.

But it does have limits.

For example, in the 1800’s, Mr. Morgan and his robber baron cronies came by with another scheme where they promised that locals would get rich if only we let them change the landscape. We did. They got rich, built great mansions near the big cities, and left us to help the land heal.

But we forgot. Or at least some of us did. And many didn’t want to hear it when we tried to remind them.

So, I suggest a revision to Santayana’s famous quote: “Those who REFUSE TO learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

While it is too late to change the wording in the leases signed by Mr. Chase and those in the same boat, it’s not too late for them to take them to a lawyer to see what other unpleasant surprises might be in store. If his lease is like the one I have read, Mr. Chase is also responsible for any damages caused to neighbors and perhaps even for cleaning up the mess when more turbines fall or catch fire or throw pieces great distances.

That’s right: all those crazy things Calvin warned about were prophetic, unfortunately.

The good news is that the loud sound heard recently in Altona was not just a single turbine falling. It was also the sound of an investment scheme collapsing under the weight of its unkept promises and outright deceit.

MAnderson

3-28-2009

Calvin, you have a bigger heart than I. After dealing with these turbine hosts in Canada who seem to treat me like scum simply because I don’t want to lose my quality of life, I have a hard time feeling sorry for any of these people. $$$ was in their hearts when they “embraced” wind power despite the fact that they knew this would damage the community and upset their neighbours. So you made your bed…. Now you know what it’s like to be royally screwed and have no control over the situation.

Editor’s reply: The community is all that matters when it comes to this social creature we call human beings. Homo sapiens. Us. It required living with Navajos (briefly), then with Alaskan Eskimos (two years), to understand this concept. Besides, I see it practiced around the world in hunter-gatherer societies and non-Western societies. So I apply this principle here, in this community we call the North County of NYS.

My principle is that if the community is shattered, something fundamental to being human is likewise shattered. I agree that wind turbines and wind energy have shattered umpteen communities, including mine. We have all suffered. But when the occasion presents itself for healing, I will seize it.

There are many people listed in that host of liens who do not live here. They are absentee property owners. I despise these people.

Whereas the people who live here and signed leases—I don’t know their financial constraints, I don’t know their financial trials, I don’t know how sound their judgement is. I live in a dairy farming area. Dairy farming is being hammered into the ground. Dairy farmers are getting pennies on the dollar for their milk, even as the cost of feed climbs, fuel bills climb, and so forth. Many dairy farms hereabout are going up for auction. This is a tragedy of historic proportions.

I, frankly, understand why a dairy farmer about to lose his (her) land signs on with the wind companies. Mostly, it breaks my heart.

Because these people are my neighbors, I will embrace them. Yes, even when they hollered at me at public meetings. (Mind you, I hollered at them, too.)

Still, we’re neighbors. We will mend our fences. This is what real communities do. It may take years, but we will mend our fences.